. . 1 printed from The Evening Post, Februaru 18, WIS 

opy 1 



THE 

AMERICAN RED CROSS 

IN THIS WAR 

BY 

CHARLES D. NORTON. 

RED CROSS WAR COUNCIL 



ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE 

THE NEW YORK LIFE UNDERWRITERS 

FEBRUARY 16, 1918 



Reprinted from The Evening Post, February 18, 191S 



THE 

AMERICAN RED CROSS 

IN THIS WAR 

BY 

CHARLES D. NORTON 

RED CROSS WAR COUNCIL 



ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE 

THE NEW YORK LIFE UNDERWRITERS 

FEBRUARY 16, 1918 



The American Red Cross 
in this War 

Addi'ess before 

the New York Life Underwriters 

February I6th, 1918 

The American Red Cross with its Fed- 
eral charter and its diplomatic status 
under the Treaty of Geneva is an organi- 
zation of citizens which receives Govern- 
ment recognition. With its small endow- 
ment and its permanent home in Wash- 
ington it can live quietly in quiet times, 
always prepared for the emergencies 
which increasingly arise in our complex 
modern life. Its duty is to accumulate 
and record experience and to develop a 
technique for the effective handling of 

[3] 



emergency situations; it must shun any 
tendency toward rigid bureaucratic 
method; it must not stifle independent 
effort, but rather encourage it; it must be 
capable of instant expansion into a huge 
machine in time of war or of other great 
disaster, but it must be equally capable of 
prompt contraction when the emergency 
passes. This form of organization is 
peculiarly adapted to American life and 
American ways, for we have vast num- 
bers of public spirited individuals and or- 
ganizations ready and able to enlist for 
temporary service in the relief of human 
misery. To-day, for instance, millions of 
American women are knitting and sewing 
for our armies and for the needy civilians 
of Europe. So many volunteers are ready 
for this work that it is not possible at the 
moment to purchase in the markets of the 
world sufficient yarn and other materials 
to keep them fully occupied. 
[41 



Two years ago the Red Cross member- 
ship was hardly more than twenty-five 
thousand ; today it is twenty-three million. 
Two years ago its income for war relief 
was trivial; this last year it was well over 
$100,000,000, money given twice because 
given quickly, money skillfully expended 
by experts, with every penny vouched for 
and recorded with absolute accuracy and 
fidelity. And I believe that America is 
ready to refill the Red Cross treasury 
whenever the right moment comes to ask 
for it. America's heart has been deeply 
touched by the miseries of others. But do 
we Americans appreciate the seriousness 
of our own position? I think not. 

It is a deadly serious game, this war of 
peoples, with all deference to the gener- 
ous praise of America's effort by our 
courteous guest, Baron Neuflize. We are 
not yet really in that game. We do not 
at all realize what is going on in Europe. 

[5] 



The war is for most of us still an adven- 
ture. Our young people are rushing 
gladly into uniform, while the older gen- 
erations find joy in various unaccustomed 
war activities. Even in our submarine 
encounters thus far we have been fortu- 
nate, and just before they are rescued 
our shipwTecked men sing, "Where Do 
We Go From Here?" It will not be like 
this very long. We know little or nothing 
of the utter weariness of discomfort, of 
privation, of the grim and ghastly per- 
sonal losses, of the ever-sharpening pangs 
of hunger which bear on all of the people 
of all of Europe. We permit strikes in 
our ship-yards at this moment when ships 
are vital, absolutely vital, to our success. 
After a year of war our labor and indus- 
trial leaders have not solved problems that 
were attacked in England and France be- 
fore this war was three weeks old. With- 
out ships, without labor peace, all these 

[6] 



great efforts of ours bear the same rela- 
tion to the actual fight that a moving pic- 
ture bears to the thing it portrays. We 
are not down to the real business of war. 
Among our enemies there may be grow- 
ing numbers of liberty-loving Germans 
who realize with horror that they are fight- 
ing and dying to enslave the world. On 
our side, the conviction deepens that this 
curse of conquest by militarism must be 
stamped out by the Allied Armies; but 
soldiers alone cannot win this war. The 
peoples that will win the war are the 
peoples that can endure ; and if the Allies 
cannot endure, the Allies will be whipped. 
Our Red Cross sensed this early. We 
threw ourselves instantly and unre- 
servedly into the struggle to preserve 
among our Allies and to create among 
our own people this spirit of endurance, 
or morale. Without waiting for our 
armies, our Red Cross mobilized a great 

[7] 



force of men and women and money. The 
work has gone forward under Murphy, 
James Perkms, Folks, Patten, Devine, 
Swan, Margaret Curtis and all that group 
in France; under Endicott, Wells, and 
Mrs. Whitelaw Reid in England; under 
Baker, Taylor, Robert Perkins and Am- 
bassador and Mrs. Page in Italy; under 
Bicknell and Van Schaick in Belgium; 
under Severance and Ryan in Serbia; 
under Anderson in Rumania; under Bill- 
ings and Thompson in Russia, a great 
force of devoted men and women under 
the American flag and the Red Cross flag 
to fight misery, to fight tuberculosis, to 
reunite refugee families, to feed the hun- 
gry, to care for the sick, to locate pris- 
oners, and to prepare — always to prepare 
— for the great rising tide of sick and 
wounded American soldiers and sailors. 

The Italian situation, and particularly 
the great Italian retreat, affords an apt 

[8] 



illustration of the need for work behind 
the lines such as our Red Cross has under- 
taken. 

My visit along the Italian front oc- 
curred during the week just preceding the 
great November retreat, and at the front 
line trenches above Gorizia and Monte 
Santo I saw the very spot where later 
the line broke and the Germans burst 
through. Fighting almost everywhere on 
enemy soil, the Italian armies had cap- 
tured positions nearly impregnable. Their 
engineers had built superb roads to the 
very front. They had spanned mountain 
gorges with ingenious telef ericas or aerial 
trams. Their hospital and ambulance ser- 
vice was admirable, and the transport and 
repair services were most effective. Yet 
it was possible even for a civilian then and 
there to record a premonition of impend- 
ing disaster. And why? The answer is 
to be found in that hard-worked word 



"morale.'' There v/as trouble behind the 
lines and the men knew it. Every day 
along that front noticeably large numbers 
of soldiers were sitting outside their tents 
at mid-day writing letters home. It w^as 
explained that the few north and south 
railway systems through the long, nar- 
row country were heavily overtaxed. 
South Italian soldiers had been on that 
mountain front from tvv^elve to eighteen 
months without once revisiting their 
homes, just as American boys from 
Texas, Wisconsin, Montana, and Maine 
may fight in France for months without 
seeing home. 

The Italian soldiers are hardy fellows; 
but, as the third winter's campaign came 
on, homesickness became acute, and the 
news from home was disconcerting. The 
frugal Italian woman is accustomed to fill 
her jars v»ith wheat and macaroni some- 
what in advance of daily needs. I saw in 

[101 



Rome a double line of police with arms 
interlocked surrounding a mob of women 
who were waiting for a pasta shop to open 
its doors. In the eager confusion a woman 
and her child were trampled to death by 
those women. In the central square of 
another large city we saw in the broken 
park railings evidences of the bread riots, 
in which, one week earlier, civilians had 
been killed. So that the Italian army, 
which had won a greater measure of 
tangible success than any of its allies, 
which had been held up in its August rush 
toward Vienna only by failure of its sup- 
ply of heavy ammunition and guns, be- 
came aware, as winter drew nearer, that 
their Allies who had the coal and the 
wheat had failed them and that there was 
a shortage of coal and wheat at home. 
This lowered their tone and value as sol- 
diers. They were less ready to meet the 
shock of disagreeable surprise that was in 
store for them. 

[11] 



The chlorine gas shell of the early days 
of the war was devised for use in the 
level plains of Flanders. It did not prove 
so effective or dangerous in the north 
Italian mountains; but when that sudden 
November storm of the new, invisible, 
deadly mustard gas came down upon the 
Italians, it fell upon regiments whose 
morale at that moment had been impaired ; 
and they broke. Comfortable, well-fed 
war critics in America have said too much 
of treachery, of hostile propaganda. 
There was something of both and a few 
officers and men were shot for it; but a 
grossly unjust aspersion has been cast 
upon one of the bravest, the most success- 
ful, and the most devoted of our Allies. 

From the beginning our Red Cross has 
realized that it must be braced to meet the 
shock of such a situation as that, whether 
it occurred among our own troops or 
among our Allies. First of all the Red 

[ 121 



Cross financed itself; then established its 
great warehouses in New York, at the 
French ports, in Paris and at the Fronts. 
It bought goods — blankets, hospital sup- 
plies, sweaters — and then more and more 
goods. It organized and equipped motor 
transports; it mobilized relief workers; it 
centralized shipping arrangements; it di- 
vided the United States into thirteen divi- 
sions with headquarters each self-con- 
tained; and by thus de-centralizing it 
quickly relieved the congestion in Wash- 
ington, and then with all possible free- 
dom from red-tape it settled down to hard 
labor. 

Let me tell you of a few typical activi- 
ties of our Red Cross over there. We went 
up to Soissons through roads crowded 
with men and guns converging for the 
great Chemin-des-Dames fight where one 
week later the French won a glorious vic- 
tory. Near Oeilly, just under the Ridge 

[13 1 



and within a thousand yards of a flashing 
line of French 75's, in a ruined village, 
we found sheltered a rolling canteen — a 
little Ford motor equipped with huge soup 
and coffee kettles. A vigorous young 
New Yorker, a bond salesman at home, 
and a lame, frail j^oung French Professor 
were living in that perilous spot — an 8- 
inch gun was hidden in its camouflage 
hard by. A few hours earlier a German 
shell had killed or wounded fourteen men 
within a hundred j^ards of the house. 

We arrived at sundown. Our young 
American was taking a swim in a little 
mill pond, preparatory to beginning his 
night's work. Before 2 A. M. as the night 
shifts went in or came out of the trenches, 
these two boys would hearten 1,500 
French soldiers with hot soup, coffee and 
bread. 

Further up the lines at the Railway 
junction point of Chalons, we found a 

[14] 



huge freight shed converted into an at- 
tractive canteen where thousands of 
French soldiers en route to or from their 
homes found rest, food, baths, lodging, 
while waiting for their trains. The 
Chalons canteen swarmed with men, all in 
high spirits, talking, joking about the last 
fight, the last air raid at Bar-le-Duc, or 
singing the praises of the American men 
and women who found it worth their while 
to help win the war by washing dishes, 
serving soup, coffee, hearty stewed meats 
and war bread. We arrived at 11 P. M. 
and found Miss Marjory Nott, Miss Ely, 
Miss Mitchel, Mrs. Francis and others 
serving a train load of 500 men; and at 
nine o'clock the next morning we found 
them back at their posts for a new day's 
work. 

At Toul we saw 500 wonderful little 
French children under seven years of age, 
housed in empty barracks, being cared for 

(15 1 



by Miss McCormick and Dr. (Miss) 
Brown and others. By "cared for" I 
mean that these children, who had been 
removed from cellars in the gas zone be- 
cause they were too young to wear gas 
masks, were being separated from the 
filthy rags and the vermin which covered 
them and were being converted into 
healthy, playful little sprites. In Paris 
tenements we saw the huddled refu- 
gees being assorted and transferred 
into better quarters. In a single room 
which I measured and found to be thir- 
teen feet wide and fifteen feet long, Miss 
Curtis showed us a group of five children 
of Arras and Peronne — those ruined cities 
to the North — all under eight and all liv- 
ing night and day in that one room in care 
of a married pair — the father affected 
with tuberculosis and the mother an am- 
munition worker, trying to support them 
all. The Red Cross secured permission 

[16] 



from the French Government to take pos- 
session of unfinished apartment houses 
and other structures, the building of 
which was arrested by the war in August, 
1914; permission to do sufficient work to 
make them habitable, and then the task 
of Miss Curtis and her associates w^as to 
break up those congested groups and 
bring them into a condition of life suitable 
for human beings. 

We saw Dr. Farrand, Dr. White and 
Dr. Miller creating sunny wards for the 
many tuberculous soldiers, stimulating 
with greatest skill and diplomacy French 
leadership in a public health reform com- 
paratively new in France; and then in 
cooperation with that French leadership 
mobilizing the scientific methods, the 
money, and the staff of the Red Cross and 
the Rockefeller Foundation Commission. 

We have heard too much of tuberculosis 
in French; we have heard too much that 

( 171 



France is "bled- white." If that superb, 
determined army of 5,000,000 men — the 
best in Europe — which is even today hold- 
ing two-thirds of the Western Front, is 
the army of a Nation "bled- white," I 
should be sorry to be compelled to face 
them when their blood is red. 

So too of England's glorious effort we 
have a scant appreciation. Four days at 
the British Front and three at the Tyne 
and the Clyde and at the Grand Fleet in 
the North, and a visit to the great new 
government munition works, convinced 
me that it is a new England over there. 
The old rigidity of social structure has 
gone. They are dealing with labor — man- 
fashion, face to face. In the Unions, big- 
ger and better and more sensible leaders 
have appeared. Among the employers 
there is coming to the front the type of 
man who is fair, who declines to profiteer, 
who knows the need of decent housing and 

\ 181 



of moderate hours of work, who is close 
to his work and his workers. The women 
have become enormously important as 
workers. On certain repetition jobs on 
machines they excel the men. During a 
recent offensive General Haig called sud- 
denly for a large supply of shells of a 
certain calibre. Teams of the best men 
workers and the best women workers were 
organized. The women won by 30% on 
a week's work. 

In the presence of National danger 
English common-sense methods prevail — 
and when this war ends, that new England 
will be a far more dangerous commercial 
competitor for Germany than before; for 
in adjusting her war profits and war taxes 
she has permitted and encouraged an 
almost complete reconstruction of her an- 
tiquated industrial plant. 

An afternoon on Vimy Ridge, looking 
out over the city of Lens and the sur- 

[191 



rounding plain, watching the shells ex- 
plode in the towns and on the trenches, 
listening to the rattle of the "heavies" as 
they flew over our heads, gave us a sense 
of the mastery which the English have ac- 
quired by marvelous organization and by 
laborious fighting — ^mastery of the higher 
ground — superiority in quantity and 
quality of shells — mastery of themselves; 
so that with the old resolution, the old 
courage, the new England fronts and 
bests a military machine that has been 
constructed through forty-five consecutive 
years of military effort. 

In all that welter our troops will soon 
take their place under the able Pershing. 
And our Red Cross has its place over 
there. Here behind the lines you can sup- 
port the efforts of Director General of 
Civilian Relief, Frank Persons, and his 
civilian relief committees. Not one of you 
but knows a man who has left his bench 

[201 



or his desk and has left anxious ones be- 
hind. Give them your sympathy, your 
friendship, and if need be your help. Join 
these Red Cross Committees: keep this 
great citizen organization financed; and 
loyally help the men and women in charge 
of the Red Cross to attain the efficiency, 
the broad spirit of sympathy, to which 
they aspire. 

And ever bear in mind that when peace 
comes there will follow a sickening realiza- 
tion over there of the horrible destruction 
and devastation that has fallen on parts 
of Belgium and France and Italy and Po- 
land. Then will come our best oppor- 
tunity to show our appreciation of the 
plain truth that for two or three long 
years, while we prospered, they fought our 
fight. I do not know how it will end ; but 
as I drove from Vimy to Amiens, past 
Arras, Cambrai, Albert, Peronne and St. 
Quentin, through a desert as great in ex- 

[21] 



tent as the Connecticut Valley, it was 
clear that no money indemnity will com- 
pensate. Nothing but the labor of men's 
hands can restore these ruined lands. I 
could only hope that the day will soon 
come when the victorious Allies can say 
to a beaten Germany: Now choose! 
Your valleys shall be equally desolated, 
your cities shall be equally destroyed; or 
you shall leave here your millions of men 
in uniform, without arms and under 
guard, your tentage, your stores and 
your trucks; here they shall remain at 
work until they have restored what they 
have destroyed; and only when they have 
restored it may they go home. 



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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

015 845 673 4 



